The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In a multiple power supply design, it may often be necessary for logic circuits to signal across voltage domains. A low-overhead solution may be particularly important where separate technologies operate at different supply voltages. For example, in an integrated circuit chip, memory cells including low voltage components may operate at a different supply voltage than other portions of the chip including higher voltage components. Current voltage level shifting circuits may be effective, but have drawbacks including significant delay, area, and power overhead. In addition, current voltage level shifting circuits also may require both low and high voltage supplies to operate. Routing power supply wires between regions dedicated to separate voltage domains is challenging and inefficient.